11 Jan 2012

Since installing Opera V1.0.4 a few days ago my Inspiron 630m Win XP PC has started to behave very oddly. For years it has worked in a very stable fashion with very few issues in 6 years of use. Now it is slow (very slow) even when not using OPERA, CPU load is high and running Ccleaner, which usually takes a minute, took nearly AN HOUR to get rid of 156M of files to be cleaned up. Now, I cannot PROVE the link, but the coincidence is remarkable.

To make matters worse, the software once installed does not appear to be listed in the list to uninstall. Not being a PC expert I am loath to just remove all the obvious files in case this damn program has left something behind that "leaves its mark".

The lesson is DO NOT INSTALL DODGY, UNSTABLE AND POORLY WRITTEN SOFTWARE unless you know what you are doing and you know how to get rid of it safely and completely.

OPERA, as a weak signal mode is interesting, but I am VERY unhappy that it has messed up my good old faithful PC.

7 comments:

Hi Roger, Of course you can't prove these junk is from this Opera software. Could it be it opened a certain port on the internet? Don't know if you use a solid firewal? Anyway, I already found the program suspicious and warned you. I did not install it myself, I first want to read what the experiences from others are. And your post is not very encouraging...73, Bas

Having removed all trace of OPERA and ROS, done a system restore back to early January, run CCleaner to remove unwanted files, checked the registry, and for good measure updated Firefox, all now seems to be well.

I understand that many HAMs use oldish computers in the shack (I am one of them), but since I also own a recent (2010+) computer I have forced myself to a safety procedure.

I installed a virtualization software on the real computer and I run a virtual machine on which I do all sort of experiments. This way the real computer remains clean and light, while I can easily take/restore snapshots of the virtual system.

I have successfully mapped physical RS232 and USB ports up to the virtual machine, so there is nothing I cannot do from there.

This way you can also run a Linux base system and virtualize the Microsoft OS.